Defining Children’s Metafiction: Authorship and Readership in Emily Gravett’s Picturebooks

The self-reflexive tendency that governs contemporary picturebooks is revealing of a widespread obsession with meta-levels in postmodern culture. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century, most art forms have been experiencing—some more intensely than others—a phenomenon that Werner Wolf calls metaization or metareference. Advancing Dan Sperber’s theoretical frame, Wolf explores self-awareness across different media and the transmigration of metaization from literature to other fields (Metareference 25). Metafiction denotes metareference in fiction; other media, however, engage in metareferential discourse, and children’s literature is one field that has been affected by this cross-pollination—other areas would include music, film, TV and animation films, comics, computer games, and advertising (11). Wherever metaization strikes, it “always triggers an awareness of the medial status of the work or system under consideration (its quality as artefact)” (11–12).

This article looks closely at the metafictional turn in children’s literature, which partakes in the hitherto increasing meta-referential rhetoric in postmodernism. Emily Gravett’s Wolves and Mouse’s Big Book of Fear exemplify characters as both readers and authors of the fiction the actual reader is consuming. These picturebooks pronounce their fictional makeup and provocatively draw attention to themselves as artifice both on the level of the text and illustration. They artfully play with literary conventions by deliberately destabilizing the distinction between the fictional and the real and by foregrounding readers-writers, consumers-creators as agents of the writing process. We will begin with a discussion of metafiction followed by a close examination of the Gravett books.

Metafiction “designates the quality of disclosing the fictionality of a narrative” (Neumann and Nünning 204). In a variety of ways and through utilizing a number of different literary devices, metafiction positions fiction’s artificiality. Most of the discussions on metafiction in academic circles today, including children’s literature, rely on two seminal studies that helped launch “metafiction” as a popular term in the eighties: Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narratives: The Metafictional Paradox and Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Waugh’s definition stresses fiction’s polemical relation to reality (2), whereas Hutcheon’s underlines the paradoxical nature of the metafictional text: the readers are ushered into an imaginary realm whose fictiveness they are compelled to acknowledge, while at once they become fiction’s co-creator (Hutcheon 5). Like Hutcheon, Umberto Eco in The Role of the Reader views the metatext as a type of text that involves reader participation as well as articulates the nature of books. Advancing his thesis on open and closed texts—alternatives to Roland Barthes’s writerly and readerly respectively (4)—Eco speculates the metatext as a third division: closed texts compel the reader to cooperate and “think their way” (256); open texts engage the reader with literary devices making him/her a part of them; and metatexts “tell stories about the way stories are built up,” interacting with the reader by toying with his/her role as a narratee (256). In metatexts readers are engaged at the same time as the stories’ fictional status is undermined.

Whereas Waugh and Hutcheon focus on the act of representation of fiction and Eco on the role of the reader in a self-conscious text, cognitive narrative theory looks at metafiction in terms of the embedded levels of discourse. In Metareference across Media, Wolf defines metaization—a term that addresses the meta-level of any given discipline—as “the movement from a first cognitive or communicative level to a higher one on which the first-level thoughts and utterances . . . self-reflexively become objects of reflection and communication” (3). Wolf affirms that metaization “activates a certain cognitive frame in the recipient’s mind” (27) that goes beyond the mere self-reflexive tendency of a medium pointing to itself. Rather this cognitive frame, “a special type of self-reference” (23), embodies “the at least passive knowledge that something is not ‘reality’ as such but a reality thought, felt or represented by someone else, in short that this is a phenomenon or a ‘reality’ processed through a...